Now more than ever in the world of professional golf, it is safe to say that youth shall be served. It wasn’t all that long ago that golfers of note such as Curtis Strange and Payne Stewart played college golf, then headed off to some faraway circuit in Asia for a few years of seasoning, then got through Q School, and ultimately made it onto to PGA Tour.
In the case of Strange, who played college golf at Wake Forest University and subsequently won the NCAA Championship and the Western Amateur, it took him almost four years from the time he turned professional until he won his first PGA Tour event, the 1979 Pensacola Open. In the case of Payne Stewart, it was more of the same. He attended Southern Methodist University, turned pro in 1979, headed off to Asia where he won the India Open and the Indonesian Open, finally qualified onto the PGA Tour, and won the 1982 Miller High Life Quad Cities Open. Strange would win his first of two back-to-back U.S. Opens in 1988 while Stewart would win his first of three majors at the 1989 PGA Championship. Way back then, nothing seemed to come easy in the world of professional golf. There was no Korn Ferry Tour and you had to go overseas to get your beak wet. It was tough, it was a grind, and it was costly.
If we look back at this past weekend, the journey that Curtis Strange and Payne Stewart took in the 1970s is a far different one from the path taken by Tom Kim of South Korea and Eugenio Chacarra of Spain. Both Kim and Chacarra won this past weekend. Both won by three strokes. Kim defeated Patrick Cantlay, the 2021 PGA Tour golfer of the year. Chacarra outlasted past Masters champion Patrick Reed. Kim won his tournament in Las Vegas on the PGA Tour while Charcarra won the Saudi-funded LIV Golf tournament in Bangkok. Both men won tournaments very far away from home. Of course, their journey hasn’t been a long one as Kim is just 20 years old while Charcarra walked away from his senior year in college and is only 22 years old. That’s pretty heady stuff for veritable kids. After all, what were we doing when we were 20-something?
Kim Joo-byung is known as Tom Kim throughout the world of golf. He has made headlines during the past three months by winning the Wyndham in Greensboro, showing true grit while serving as the star of the International Team in the recently concluded Presidents Cup, and then avoiding a golf hangover with the stellar win in Vegas.
Tom Kim is the son of a South Korean professional golfer who at one time played competitively in America on what was then called the Buy.com Tour (now the Korn Ferry Tour). The elder Kim decided to settle down, somewhat, and became a teaching golf professional. He did travel the Eastern Hemisphere with his family as he worked in South Korea, Australia, the Philippines and Thailand. His son Tom was born in 2002, took immediately to the game, and had great success as a junior golfer, winning the Philippine Junior Amateur as a 15 year old. The following year he won the Philippine Amateur Open as well as the RVC Cup Amateur. At that point in time he decided to turn pro. He was just 16 years old.
While other 17-year-olds were in their junior year of high school, Tom Kim was winning three times on the Asian Development Tour. He got promoted to the Asian Tour and won the 2019 India Open. He won the KPGA Gunsan Open the following year on the Korean Tour and won for a second time in Korea at the SK Telecom Open. His big moment came at the 2020 Singapore Open as he finished within the top five and got an invite to that summer’s British Open. Kim was the leading money winner on the 2020-21 Asian Tour, and that got him an invite to the Scottish Open on the DP World Tour. He received a special temporary invite onto the American PGA Tour this past summer and he finished in seventh place at the Rocket Mortgage in Detroit and then shot 61 on Sunday to win in Greensboro in early August.
Kim is the second coming of Nick Faldo. He is 105th on tour in driving distance and counters that by being fifth in driving accuracy. That sets him up to being ranked first in greens in regulation. At Las Vegas he recorded zero bogeys over 72 holes. This has all the makings of a most brilliant career. A great score might beat him, but he won’t beat himself.
Eugenio Chacarra walked away from Oklahoma State this past June to join the LIV Tour. He supposedly signed a three-year contract and is the first true young star to appear on the Saudi-backed circuit. He was the second-ranked college amateur in America just four months ago and last weekend in Bangkok he pocketed $4.75 million for his first professional win.
Born in Madrid in 2000, he is from a golfing family. His sister is on the golf team at Wake Forest. He won the Grand Prix de Landes as a 15 year old and two years later he captured the Copa de Andalusia. Eugenio won the individual title at the 2021 European Amateur Team Championship. This spring he won the College NIT and was the medalist at the NCAA Regional in Columbus. Because of his individual college ranking, he could have immediately qualified onto the Korn Ferry Tour, but he opted to take a different path by joining the LIV Tour.
Last weekend in Bangkok, Chacarra finished at 19-under-par to safely win by three. While he did finish ahead of such name golfers as Reed, Bryson DeChambeau, Brooks Koepka and Phil Mickelson, it needs to be noted that it was a three-round, 54-hole tournament with just 48 invited contestants, also including Jediah Morgan, Turk Petit, Chase Koepka and Phachara Khongwatmai. While I watched Kim win last Sunday, there is no viable broadcasting for the LIV Tour, so I can’t tell you how it was that Chacarra raced to the top of the leader board.
Eugenio Chacarra has now played in five professional tournaments. Tom Kim has played as a pro non-stop since he was a 16 year old, yet in less than one season on the PGA Tour he has won twice in 16 tries and has four top 10s. I know I’ll see Tom Kim in the four majors next year and yet I don’t when I’ll first see Eugenio Chacarra at all let alone in one of the game’s grand slam championships. I do know that I am intrigued by the career potential of 20-year-old Tom Kim while I don’t know what to say about Eugenio. I do know that both of their bank accounts are in really good shape, yet we don’t see much of Eugenio because he competes on a distant circuit with zero exposure. Nonetheless I do know that in light of how they played last weekend, both young men have talent and money. They are way ahead of the pace set by some of their predecessors such as Curtis Strange and Payne Stewart. Youth is being served.
